Ultrasound imaging provides a real-time image with information about the interior of an object or subject such as an organ, a blood vessel, etc., and/or the flow inside a blood vessel.
Color flow mapping (CFM) is an approach used to estimate and visualize the flow inside blood vessels. CFM can be realized efficiently and made feasible using a low-cost velocity estimator. Unfortunately, CFM can only show the relative blood flow information of whether the flow is towards or away from the transducer. Hence, it does not show the absolute flow direction nor absolute velocities, and it is operator dependent.
Vector flow imaging (VFI) is another approach used to estimate and visualize the flow inside a blood vessel. VFI ultrasound imaging can simultaneously show both the absolute flow direction and the absolute velocity. However, VFI velocity estimators have had significantly higher “computational requirements” and hence more computational resources to realize images with similar resolution and frame-rate as CFM.
As used herein, the term “computational requirement” includes the number of operations in computing a given function. As used herein, the term “operation” includes at least a real-valued multiply-accumulate operation, a real-valued multiply-add, a real-valued multiply or a real-valued addition/subtraction operation.
This need for more computational resources for implementing VFI may add cost to a new ultrasound imaging system, relative to a new ultrasound imaging system without VFI capabilities, and/or prohibit VFI from being implemented on an existing ultrasound imaging system.